“I wish we could have been friends back then,” he says. “I think we would have understood each other. Helped each other, maybe.”
She’s no longer crying so much as fighting the urge to cry, choking off the sound as it reaches her throat. “It’s too late.”
“I know.” He stands up and offers his hand, trying to get Molly on her feet. “Come on.”
She looks at him, her face still smeared and striped with black, her hair as disheveled as he’s ever seen it. He smiles at her anyway, wondering how she’ll explain her appearance when she gets home. The thought is nothing more than that at first. A thought, a flicker. But suddenly, it combusts.
“You’re not — we’re not going to tell anyone about this, are we?”
Molly closes her eyes and wipes her face with her dress, leaving a stain on the fabric that looks like an inkblot. Then she exhales and slowly reaches for his hand, staring at him until her fingertips are almost touching his. Kyung is so relieved to see her accepting his help, he doesn’t notice the flash at first, another bright blur of pink as something sharp and painful rips across his cheek.
“Molly!” he shouts. But she’s already running for it, her sweater flapping behind her like a cape.
Kyung stands in the open doorway, watching the Buick back out and tear down the street. Half a block away, and she’s still gunning the engine, as if she expects him to follow. Molly doesn’t yield, much less stop at the intersection before turning, causing another driver to slam on his brakes. When her car disappears, he reaches up to touch his stinging cheek. There’s blood on his fingertips. There’s blood everywhere, actually. Fresh red drops of it on his hands and shirt and pants. He walks back inside and closes the door, scanning the kitchen, which is even messier than it was before. The pitcher that fell off the counter is lying in big, jagged shards beneath the sink. A fine powder of crushed glass dusts the area where they were standing. He looks himself over again, hopeful that the blood is all his, when he notices his feet, clad in thin, flimsy sandals. His bare skin is cut in so many places, it looks like he kicked in a window.
Kyung cleans up the glass and carefully deposits the broken pieces into an empty plastic bag. Then he ties the handles and pushes the bag deep into the trash where Gillian won’t find it. But covering his tracks is useless, he thinks. Molly is going to tell everyone. Her husband, his wife, maybe even his parents. Isn’t that what devout people do? Sin and repent; sin and repent again. He returns to his beer on the counter, emptying the rest of the can and immediately opening another before he can convince himself not to. Drinking is a choice, he thinks. His choice. Molly was too, and now he has to live with the consequences, however bad they might be. He’s fucked — he knows that — but for the first time, he’s fucked by something he chose to do, not something that was done to him, or something he had to do out of guilt or obligation or fear. He laughs even though his heart is pounding. This one belongs entirely to him.
* * *
Every summer, Kyung’s parents invited him to visit the beach house with Ethan and Gillian. And every summer, he declined, unwilling to spend an entire weekend in their company. His only glimpse of the property was the painting on his parents’ mantel in Marlboro, an abstract piece commissioned by his mother’s decorator as a gift. On canvas, the house seemed large, but unexceptional — a tall white block with a red front door. In person, it’s something else entirely. When the GPS tells him to turn onto a private road, Kyung hesitates, not quite believing what he sees. At the far end of the road, a single house sits high on a bluff, surrounded by a spectacular, expensive kind of nothing — no neighbors, no trees — just the sky above and a steep drop to the bay below. The three-story colonial looks like something out of a postcard, lit brightly from within as the last sliver of sun descends into the horizon.
He imagines Gillian’s reaction as she drove up the same road earlier that day. Mouth open, fingertips pressed against the window, looking like the girl from the Flats that she really is. He knows what she’s probably thinking now; he knows the inconsistency of her mind. Pride is her Achilles, but she wouldn’t hesitate to accept Jin’s help if he offered. With a few keystrokes or a checkbook and pen, his parents could erase all their debts and give them a fresh start. But their help would come with a price far worse than what they live with now. Every invitation his parents extended, every request for help or company or time — they wouldn’t be able to refuse if they took their money. Kyung isn’t about to indenture himself to them now, not after so many years of trying to avoid it. The minute he moved out for college, he juggled part-time jobs, shared apartments with too many people, took out loans to pay tuition, and took out more loans when he was short on cash — all because he didn’t want to owe his parents anything. Still, he feels a flare of resentment as he surveys the enormous property. He never asked for their help, but not once did they offer.
The long, unpaved road curves toward the water, rattling the car and everything inside it. In the passenger seat, eight empty beer cans clank against each other, accompanied by the noisy ping of loose gravel churning in the tire wells. Kyung switches off his headlights, trying to make his approach less noticeable. He wasn’t entirely committed to coming to Orleans when he started driving, and despite all the beer he drank along the way, he can’t resummon the courage he felt back at the house. By now, he assumes that Molly has confessed everything to her husband, begging for his forgiveness, and God’s too. It’s only a matter of time before he’ll have to tell Gillian, a conversation so daunting, it feels like a wall of stone — something so tall, he has to crane his neck up to see where it might end. His only choice is to climb over it or wait to be crushed if it falls. There’s no other way around this time, and maybe this is what he wanted all along, to force his own hand.
Kyung pulls into a parking space, hidden from view by the shadow of Connie’s huge Suburban. He gets out and closes his door, pushing it into place with a click instead of a slam. As he walks up the front steps, he considers turning back. No one saw or heard him arrive. No one is expecting him until tomorrow. But his desire to flee gives way to the blurriness of his eyesight, the spinning sensation in his head. To attempt driving back now would land him in jail or a ditch or the ocean, so he knocks and holds his breath, waiting for the door to open. When it doesn’t, he tries the knob, which should be locked but isn’t. He steps into the entryway, relieved to find it empty. To his left, there’s a living room with a long wall of windows that overlook the bay. To his right is a study filled with books and a soft, pillowlike couch that screams his name. Nearly everything in the house is white. White walls, white ceilings, white furniture. Like the house in Marlboro, Mae clearly spared no expense on the renovations. The place looks exactly the way a beach house should. Open and airy, like something out of a magazine where no children or pets or people actually live.
He takes a few more steps inside, following the muffled sound of voices toward the back of the house. The farther he tiptoes, the more the air begins to smell like butter and brine. At the end of a long hallway, Kyung stops before an open door and presses his back against the wall, listening to the conversation in the adjoining room. Jin tells Connie that the fishing is terrible in Nauset Bay, but offers the use of his boat to visit Salt Pond Bay instead. A woman whose voice he doesn’t recognize exclaims that she loves boats; she has ever since she was a child. Gillian encourages Ethan to climb into his chair by himself. You’re big enough now, she says. You can do it. The conversation is much easier and lighter than he imagined, moving amiably from one topic to the next without so much as a pause. He doesn’t know where his mother and Marina are — in the kitchen, probably — but so far, everything seems to be going well, better than he would have expected.